Introduction
This essay explores “A Worn Path,” one of Eudora Welty’s most anthologized stories. It provides a number of contextual readings as well as biographical information about Welty. Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson Mississippi, where she was based for most of her life. She lived in her family’s second home until her death in 2001. She grew up with her parents and two brothers and wrote from an early age. After attending the University of Wisconsin, she went to Columbia University in New York to study advertising for one year. She returned to Mississippi where she worked as a journalist reporting on Southern life. It was at this period of her life that she took most of her photographs, some of which would be published in her two collections of photography.
Essay Body
In 1940, she began to work with the editor Diarmuid Russell. Her stories began to appear in “The New Yorker” and “The Atlantic Monthly.” Her story “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies” appeared in “The Best American Stories of 1938.” Her first collection of short stories was published in 1941, entitled “A Curtain of Green.” Her first novel, “The Robber Bridegroom,” was published the following year. “The Wide Net,” another story collection, appeared in 1943. In 1946, Welty’s second novel, “Delta Wedding,” was published. In 1949, “The Golden Apples” appeared. This cycle of seven linked stories remains her most radical experiment with form and her favorite work of fiction. The stories are linked by the fictional setting of Morgana, a range of recurring characters, a network of mythological references and intertextual engagement with the poetry of W.B. Yeats. “The Golden Apples” enacts (in its form) Welty’s preoccupation with connection and ‘confluence,’ one of her favorite words. “The Bride of Innisfallen,” another collection of short stories, was published in 1955.
In 1980, her story collections appeared together in one volume, “The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty,” along with “The Golden Apples.” Essays deal with a range of subjects, from her own writing methodology to personal recollections and celebrations of favorite writers such as Chekhov, Austen, Porter, Cather and Faulkner. In 1983, she received the Pulitzer Prize for her final novel, “The Optimist’s Daughter.” In the same year her autobiography, “One Writer’s Beginnings,” was published too much acclaim. Welty is revered for her lyrical narrative style, her keen ear for dialogue and her evocation of place. She was the recipient of many awards and honors. She won O. Henry Awards for several of her stories, including “The Demonstrators” “The Whole World Knows” and “A Worn Path.” In 1972, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1979; she received the National Medal for Literature. She received honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Harvard and Yale.
The story first appeared in “Atlantic Monthly” in 1941 and was published as part of Welty’s first short story collection, “A Curtain of Green and Other Stories” in the same year. It has also been published as a single text and continues to be on reading lists in schools and universities. The story dramatizes the journey of an old African-American woman who is walking to the city to fetch medicine for her grandson. “A Worn Path” won the O. Henry Award in 1941 and is celebrated for its symbolism, economy and ambiguity.
The name “Phoenix” evokes images of the mythical bird which rises from the flames and regenerates. Welty develops this association, figuring the recovery of Phoenix’s memory as “a flicker” and “a flame” of “comprehension”. Birds feature prominently in the story; some symbolize the fragility of Phoenix and her grandson and others are more sinister and seem to presage death. In the opening paragraph, the narrative voice describes Phoenix as a “solitary little bird.” Later, Phoenix sees a bob-white “stuffed” in the hunter’s bag, “its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead.” This image resonates backwards and forwards. Phoenix talks to the “little bob-whites” at the beginning of the story and at the end she compares her grandson to a “little bird” with his beak open, waiting to be fed. When Phoenix pockets the hunter’s nickel, a bird flies by and she remembers that God is watching her. When Phoenix encounters a buzzard, a bird of prey, she asks him “Who you watching?”. The mourning dove evokes the threat of death, as does the scarecrow which Phoenix initially takes for a ghost.
The chains which Phoenix seems to feel about her feet, the thorns, and the barbed wire symbolize the continuing oppression which restricts the social mobility of the African-American people in the South. Symbols in Phoenix’s dreams figure the possibility of social justice, equality and prosperity for all: The hand that Phoenix reaches up in the hope of receiving help and the marble cake which is offered by the little boy. The two nickels and the windmill are more tangible symbols of promise, if only on a small scale. The diploma represents not only the end of the journey for Phoenix but also the educational opportunity that she has been denied. As in many of Welty’s texts, some of the experiences and tropes in this story are reminiscent of fairy-tales: A female subject makes her way through a wood on a mission to help the afflicted; she faces a series of challenges and temptations; she meets and overcomes a threatening male.
Racial conflict emerges clearly in Phoenix’s encounters with white people. She defines the white woman whom she asks to tie her shoe as a “lady.” In asking her to perform this task, she places the white woman in a position of servitude that is assigned to African-Americans. A similar role reversal is played out in Phoenix’s dream. She responds to the little boy’s offer of marble-cake with measured compliance: “That would be acceptable”. The white hunter tries to assert his power over Phoenix by pointing his gun at her and by reminding her of her vulnerability. Although the white man does not physically harm Phoenix, his words betray the prejudices which remain entrenched in the South: his presumption that “colored people” visit town to see Santa Claus and his coded threat; “stay home and nothing will happen to you”. Phoenix is acutely aware of the opportunities she has been deprived of by the white race: She describes herself as “an old woman without an education”.
Phoenix has certainly experienced much of this history firsthand. When she stoops to drink from a well, she states: “Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born”. In effect, Phoenix presumes that nobody predates her. She does not contest the hunter’s estimate that she must be “a hundred years old” and she tells the nurse that she was “too old at the Surrender” for an education. It is therefore apparent that she has experienced life before, during and after the Civil War. As Nancy K. Butterworth notes, race relations did not improve in the South before the Civil Rights movement. Welty’s story registers the lack of change. Phoenix’s description of herself as “an old woman without an education” reflects disillusionment with the absence of progress.
The thorns which momentarily impede Phoenix have obvious religious connotations. When she steals the money, she registers this theft as a sin against God, but does so impassively. Although Welty grew up in a “religious-minded society” she did not belong to a “churchgoing family.” She reveals that her “reverence” for life emanated from her experience of earthly wonders such as the “frescoes of Piero, of Giotto” but that she greatly appreciated the language and imagery of the Bible which resonates throughout the literature of Southern writers (One Writer’s Beginnings, p. 33). Much of Welty’s fiction is informed by her knowledge of classical and mythical narratives. Nancy Butterworth notes that Phoenix has been compared to a number of mythical “fertility figures” such as Persephone and Adonis.
Conclusion
Crucial to the story’s success is Welty’s choice of narrative point of view. By confining the reader to Phoenix’s perceptions, Welty avoids the danger of sentimentality that she would have risked in a more external presentation of a good person.
Phoenix’s thoughts and words are enough to establish her unself-conscious love, courage, and other attractive qualities, but Welty uses the tainted evaluations of the people Phoenix meets to bring out the central qualities of love and courage that illuminate the idea Welty saw in the image that became the origin of her story. That image of a solitary old woman walking across a winter landscape came to mean “the deep-grained habit of love.”
Works Cited
Butterworth, Nancy K. “A Worn Path” The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. London: Penguin, 1983, pp. 142-49.